...or you've been in a serious fight and couldn't escape and somehow, when the spit hit the fan, everything became chaos. You couldn't get your balance, your brain was reeling, you couldn't find your range and all the techniques that were so easy to execute in the dojo... you just couldn't get them off. Maybe you were seriously hurt. Or maybe you've experienced one of the following:

•You have a Black Belt in a popular style, yet students with less skill and greater physical attributes can control you.•When you try Aikido throws on your athlete friends they won’t cooperate by falling down.•You’re a high level forms and sparring competitor who’s been knocked silly in a bar fight.•You’re a dedicated martial artist who, after 20 years, suddenly realizes three things:

1) That you’re no closer to understanding and performing feats of “Chi” then when you started.2) You know nothing about avoiding or coping with real violence.

3) You're beginning to suspect that endless microscopic examination of proper form is preventing you from seeing the bigger picture: that practicing forms doesn't make you formless, spontaneous or adaptive to the chaos of REAL violence. In fact, it cripples your ability to apply internal principles to true fighting.

These may be highly disturbing issues, especially to those who regard the way they train their particular style as a religion. Ask yourself: what do splits, board-breaking, and high spinning wheel kicks have in common? Answer: they all have nothing to do with self-defense. The point is: there’s nothing inherently wrong with your art. It obviously worked for it’s founder. However, you could be training wrong-- IF your intention all along was to learn how to survive “close combat.”

"In the Art of War there are no fixed rules."

--Li Chuan, Sun Tzu, “The Art Of War”

A real attack is basically an assassination attempt on your life. The assailant is free to attack with impunity, since his tactics are not limited. He is not bound to any "rules" of combat, and you shouldn’t be either. Always remember that the best self-defense is Awareness and Avoidance with Escape the Number One objective. If you must fight to escape, you need methods that will give you the best chance to survive even if you're not an Olympic athlete. Ironically, the movement dynamics of a real fight have nothing to do with the way most martial arts are trained, and everything to do with nature. Think carefully on this. Combat is ugly, nasty, and chaotic. Classical training is very often beautiful, cooperative, and predictable. What does this all mean? Spontaneity is the only realistic way to train. We need to become masters of Chaos, not Kata.Solution 1: Train Basic Tools...

In 1989, the Russians instituted a hand-to-hand combat methodology that far surpassed ours in terms of simplicity and effectiveness. Ironically, it was nearly identical to the system our military used--back in World War II. What happened? Through a political process too convoluted and distressing to elaborate on here, over the years, our soldiers' hand-to-hand training has become overly complicated, mis-directed, and relatively ineffective except under "sportive or "competitive" (i.e. unrealistic) conditions.

Guided Chaos' Combatives does away with the boxing-grappling-locking nonsense that has become the "politically correct" standard of training for our soldiers in recent years. Instead of subjecting our military personnel to methods that could get them killed, Master John Perkins and Lieutenent Colonel Ridenhour USMC provide basic, effective methods proven in World War II. The prospect of confronting Japanese Soldiers in the jungle skilled in Judo and Karate led to a training overhaul by our own military in the late 1930's. Colonel Rex Applegate, William Donovan and members of the OSS created a system of simple, devastating attacks used successfully by U.S. soldiers during countless close engagements against Japanese troops in World War II. These make up the basic tools of Perkins' Guided Chaos Combatives (GCC). But GCC is only the beginning...and the first level of Guided Chaos.

Firearms: Master Perkins is one of the top handgun instructors in the U.S. and is a Certified Close Combat/Point Shooting Master Instructor under the International Combat Martial Arts Federation. Learn John Perkin's unique shooting methods to complement your hand-to-hand training.Solution 2: Take the Tools to the Next Dimension...Guided Chaos is a new and unique style of martial art created by ex-cop and homicide expert John Perkins. The premise of Guided Chaos is that all real fights are chaos and thus most attempts to use choreographed techniques will meet with disaster. As a former police officer and forensic homicide investigator studying blood spatter patterns at scenes of horrific violence, John Perkins scientifically evaluated how people really fought and died. He learned that in real bloodbaths, nothing ever happens the way you think it does. When he applied this knowledge to his police work on the streets of Yonkers, NY, what he found was that in order to adapt to chaos and survive, you have to liberate your mind from patterned technique training and instead develop free, adaptive movement principles based purely on nature and physics. Guided Chaos trains you to become a master of random motion, spontaneously creating your defense using principles of energy, movement and physics that have their roots in classical training but that have been largely ignored or forgotten over time.HOW IS GUIDED CHAOS DIFFERENT?Guided Chaos is different from other organized "styles" of martial arts in many ways, yet it can complement most of them. How different is it? First, and foremost, it has no forms. That is, it has no set and sanctified techniques, no prearranged specific responses to given specific attacks, no learn-by-the-numbers choreography to clog the mind and the reflexes with unnecessary strategic calculations. How is this possible? It does it by inverting the entire learning process. You start where most training ends. Why? Because during a real fight for your life, it is virtually impossible to deliver a stylized technique effectively; the speed, chaos, viciousness, confusion, and utter terror associated with a real fight prevents this. Your nervous system simply becomes overloaded with the flood of sensory stimuli. You can't treat your brain like an electronic dictionary of self-defense responses and expect it to select the right "technique" to counter a "matching" attack under extreme duress. It simply doesn't work that way. If you've been programmed by training a specific response to a specific attack, your defense will fail if the attack changes by even one inch from the way you've trained.

This is true whether you know one technique or one thousand. How will your body know when to deliver the strike if the sensory data it is being bombarded with has no correlation to your practice? Since all serious (non-sparring) fights are literally hell-storms of chaos, you cannot rely confidently on choreographed training. This is not conjecture. It has been proven through exhaustive experience, countless police and morgue reports, and testimonials by police officers with high-ranking belts from various styles who's classical training failed them when the spit hit the fan.

IF GUIDED CHAOS HAS NO TECHNIQUES, HOW DO YOU TRAIN?

You train dynamic principles of movement only. The main ones are Body Unity, Looseness, Balance, and Sensitivity. There are many others, but they all focus on developing your subconscious neural pathways, resulting in what some would call "natural motion" and others would call "chi." These are developed through unusual drills and exercises and combined with the simple deadly strikes of Close Quarters Combat developed by Fairbairn, Sykes and Colonel Rex Applegate and proven in World War II. While no previous training is necessary for learning Guided Chaos, John Perkins has a reputation for teaching Black Belts how to fight better.